Sector AI, Robots and overpopulation

[Calvax]

In the late game overpopulation is an impossible issue to avoid without a lot of micromanagement. This is particularly true of any empire that has robots in it (be it a gestalt consciousness, synthetically ascended or just robot worker using empire). The discourage growth planetary edict does not affect robot production meaning if you want to prevent overpopulation you have to not only turn on the edict but manually turn off every roboticist job.

At the very least for gestalt and synthetically ascended empires discourage growth should have an equal effect on robot production. I'm in the late game of an ascended playthrough with a large empire, so I'm relying on sector automation to not have to excessively micromanage. Every planet is ending up with a huge housing and unemployment issue:

Luckily my economy is very strong so unemployment isn't an issue, and no one seems to care about housing anyway. But it would be so much better if the game had a policy for overpopulation at an empire wide level. Let us set a policy that prevents all growth (biological and synthetic) at some level pegged to housing. At the harshest all growth would stop when housing equals -1. Less harsh measures could be something like 10% over the limit or 20%.

The game has tools at the planet level to manage overpopulation and it desperately needs them at the empire level too.

 

[Terkhev]

Idk about robots, but pop growth stops when your population reaches 150% of avaiable housing. Personally I just build 50% more jobs than houses and take this stability hit.

 

[Weserübung]

Check out this recent thread that adresses some of these issues:

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/citizen-synths-migration-question.1370705/

Short answer: disable all robotics jobs so that assembly stops

 

[fleetothemoon]

I totally agree with you, OP.

However, you can still use the cease drone assembly option or stop population growth though, can't you? Just have to enable population control policies.

They should definitely enable empire wide population control though, as well as less micro-heavy resettlement options.

 

[Tech Noir Synth]

In the late game overpopulation is an impossible issue to avoid without a lot of micromanagement. This is particularly true of any empire that has robots in it (be it a gestalt consciousness, synthetically ascended or just robot worker using empire). The discourage growth planetary edict does not affect robot production meaning if you want to prevent overpopulation you have to not only turn on the edict but manually turn off every roboticist job.

At the very least for gestalt and synthetically ascended empires discourage growth should have an equal effect on robot production. I'm in the late game of an ascended playthrough with a large empire, so I'm relying on sector automation to not have to excessively micromanage. Every planet is ending up with a huge housing and unemployment issue:

View attachment 563456

Luckily my economy is very strong so unemployment isn't an issue, and no one seems to care about housing anyway. But it would be so much better if the game had a policy for overpopulation at an empire wide level. Let us set a policy that prevents all growth (biological and synthetic) at some level pegged to housing. At the harshest all growth would stop when housing equals -1. Less harsh measures could be something like 10% over the limit or 20%.

The game has tools at the planet level to manage overpopulation and it desperately needs them at the empire level too.

Don't you worry about Machine empires. Paradox has graciously added a "cease drone production" decision for the cost of 25 influence to every planet. Thanks to this, you can now waste 25 influence, keep your pops working replicator jobs and produce 0 robots! Of course, you could have just disabled the replicator jobs for free, have these pops work something valuable instead and not waste any influence. But I guess Paradox deemed it neccesary to add such a noob trap.

Of course for every empire with Robots, you can do the same to stop Robot production. But I agree, its a hassle to do that on every planet. Overall pop migration needs a huge rework since every lategame becomes resettlement simulator. Yes we have the resolution for pop resettelment now, but hat its only available to members within the GC and it doesn't seem as effective as it should be. To lock such a heavily asked-for feature behind the GC was a bad decision in the first place.

 

[4xForEver]

Instead of empire wide policy and other suggestions, I think the best resolution is one or both of the following 2 options:
1. make pop growth much slower.
2. make pop growth progressively slower as planet grows.

the point is that to make a planet reach 100 pops you would need to play very long game or have very strong pop growth such as
planetary growth decitions and growth edicts if you want to go to 100 pops ASAP.

100 pop's I guess means 100 billion citizens, which is really big number of people for a single planet.
so you need to constantly enact growth edicts and decisions to reach that, and it should still take a lot of time to reach it.

of course robots should be affected too somehow due to constant growth ratio of robots. otherwise you get too much robots and no bio pops. ie. very slow robot assembly and tech for faster robot assembly.

 

[exi123]

Why should the pop growth be slowed down on more grown planets? It should be the exact opposite. Populated worlds should produce many growth which migrates away if no jobs and/or housing is available. This is how it works... at least for our human knowledge. The europeans didnt migrate west to america for fun...

We have this small max migration of 5.0 something on planets already but this isnt nearly enough to keep it running. Why cant replacators produce "growth" into a pool which is delivered on other planets where it is needed. Same for biological empires, overgrowth should be send to other planets... who wants to stay on an overpopulated world without housing when there is a new industry planet build up somewhere with trillions of new jobs?

Each species in an empire could produce growth into an empire wide pool, when enough growth is accumulated a pop is generated where is it needed or mostly attracted. This would also solve the issue that minorities grow to much... and your main species goes extinct some kind of. If you sign a migration treaty these pools will be shared with other empires to a certain point. Next thing you need is a (automatic-) tool which can handle already grown pops captured after a war or whatever. Enslaved pops shuold be send to colonies to replace free pops, which can migrate themselves to better jobs or stay in social wellfare or utopian thing stuff. If every planet is filled/slightly overpopulated, population controls are set automatically for the whole empire whith a huge stability cost, based on your ethics.

(On other big concern is taht all these "useless" pops without housing and job need to be calculated. I had an observer game to 2550 and the bigger empires had around 3500 pops. EVERY SINGLE PLANET in some of them looked like the pictures op posted: 1:1 ratio of working and unemployed pops. These pops are crushing the ais economy, causing slowdown and lag and create an enourmous micromanagement when captured by a player.)

 

[Agamemnic]

This has been my longest peeve with Stelalris. It actually ruins the late game as the ludicrous pop sizes start decimating the CPU. I really hope the devs start thinking about the concept of "steady state" empires, planets etc.

1. Planets shoud reach a point where additional pop growth stops entirely. This will tackle the late game snowballing.
2. Empires as a whole should also reach a point where additional pop growth is very limited. To compensate, late game growth can come from production bonuses (e.g. repeatable +5% alloy production techs)
3. Habitat spam! Oh god please just make it stop.

 

[Lorenerd11]

There's a "Cease Robot Assembly" edict, it's literally the first one on the list.

That said, we do need some features to reduce the need for micromanagement, and I've made some suggestions for that before.

 

[pmchem]

I'm in the late game of an ascended playthrough with a large empire, so I'm relying on sector automation to not have to excessively micromanage. Every planet is ending up with a huge housing and unemployment issue:

Nice post -- if sector automation AI is that broken, have you posted about it in the bug report forum with all the info they want there? Seems like something that really needs fixing so that AI empires aren't crippled.

 

[Calvax]

Check out this recent thread that adresses some of these issues:

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/citizen-synths-migration-question.1370705/

Short answer: disable all robotics jobs so that assembly stops

Yes I'm aware but it's a lot of micromanagement to go through every planet checking to see if its time to turn the jobs off.

There's a "Cease Robot Assembly" edict, it's literally the first one on the list.

View attachment 563510

That said, we do need some features to reduce the need for micromanagement, and I've made some suggestions for that before.

I don't play gestalts often so was mistaken on that. This edict doesn't exist for synthetic ascension.

 

[4xForEver]

Why should the pop growth be slowed down on more grown planets? It should be the exact opposite. Populated worlds should produce many growth which migrates away if no jobs and/or housing is available. This is how it works... at least for our human knowledge. The europeans didnt migrate west to america for fun...

You are indeed correct about this, but not entirely, developed and rich countries like Germany, USA, France etc. have large populations but population growth is low compared to undeveloped countries like middle east or africa where population growth is much higher.

the point is that amount of people does contribute to lower growth, in addition to many other factors, so progressively lower growth on very populated planets is not something really odd, but it's shouldn't be a hard fact either, because again for comparison some developed and rich countries maintain population growth such as government subsidies and similar.

I still think progressivelly lower growth and/or much reduced growth on full planet is an option, nothing strange about that, and very realistic.

Lack of housing should increase emigration to another planets much much more, agree with you about that.

 

[Franton]

In the late game overpopulation is an impossible issue to avoid without a lot of micromanagement. This is particularly true of any empire that has robots in it (be it a gestalt consciousness, synthetically ascended or just robot worker using empire). The discourage growth planetary edict does not affect robot production meaning if you want to prevent overpopulation you have to not only turn on the edict but manually turn off every roboticist job.

At the very least for gestalt and synthetically ascended empires discourage growth should have an equal effect on robot production. I'm in the late game of an ascended playthrough with a large empire, so I'm relying on sector automation to not have to excessively micromanage. Every planet is ending up with a huge housing and unemployment issue:

View attachment 563456

Luckily my economy is very strong so unemployment isn't an issue, and no one seems to care about housing anyway. But it would be so much better if the game had a policy for overpopulation at an empire wide level. Let us set a policy that prevents all growth (biological and synthetic) at some level pegged to housing. At the harshest all growth would stop when housing equals -1. Less harsh measures could be something like 10% over the limit or 20%.

The game has tools at the planet level to manage overpopulation and it desperately needs them at the empire level too.

I do not agree in the least. There are plenty of options already in the game you seem to have deliberately or unknowingly avoided:
1. Don't rely on AI to properly build your planets! Disable it, replace useless/low-job buildings with something meaningful, and upgrade them to the highest tier
2. Disable roboticists jobs: One time per planet can hardly be called micromanagement. No influence/decision needed.
3. Ignore housing entirely and make sure there are enough happiness or other bonuses for the -20% stability hit - this stops organic pop growth, in case you still have bio pops around.
4. Create worker jobs: with city districts eliminated (see 2), you'll have plenty of districts to use for base resource production.
5. Create more productive buildings. I see you have a planet with 148 and half of them are eunemployed?? how is that even possible! I typically build my planets with 110-130 jobs each, and I'm not talking about Megaplexes here (although, with so many pops it might be worth using 2-3 per planet instead of whatever other amenity buildings you currently have). Here's a high pop layout I used in my 10K pops game recently (which I had to abandon due to tech cost overflow bugs: System Capital Complex, Research Institute, 10*Research lab, 2*Megaplex, Galactic Stock Exchange, Energy Nexus, ~15 generator districts. That's easily 148 jobs from buildings, -3 for roboticists assuming you disable these, +2 for Merchants (1 per 50 pops). Note the absence of a pop assembly, and the deliberate use of Megaplexes instead of Hyper Entertainment Forums to provide amenities.

Yes, the planet & sector AI is terrible at building planets and upgrading stuff properly. But you are not complaining about that - instead you are complaining about a non-issue.

P.S.:
6. Turn any race you can into servants. This may not always be possible. But if it is they will never be unemployed as long as they stay at worker level.
7. Use Ecus: they can easily provide 200+jobs.
8. Make a Resort World with 1 Precinct house (upgraded) and 14 Megaplexes. It can employ ~300 clerks and 20 merchants.

 

[RoverStorm]

1. Don't rely on AI to properly build your planets! Disable it, replace useless/low-job buildings with something meaningful, and upgrade them to the highest tier

While I personally agree, not everyone has the patience to go through 300 planets/habitats/ringworlds and handle it themselves.

I do. I'm also neurotic and obsessive over things like this. Not everyone has that kind of patience.

 

[Franton]

While I personally agree, not everyone has the patience to go through 300 planets/habitats/ringworlds and handle it themselves.

1. The OP was asking for something akin to a decision. Disabling roboticist jobs doesn't take that much more time. It is exactly what the OP was asking for, and it does't even cost influence.
2. So far I've never seen anyone mention empires with more than 100 colonies. Me, I'd say I'm going extremely wide as far as I'm concerned, and in my last game I hit the tech cost overflow bug at 93 colonies with ~10K pops.
3. It's not llike you would be disabling jobs all at once, nor would you be able to if using a decision: at 25 influence per planet you'd be restricted to at most 40 planets, and then wait for a very long time for the next batch.
4. Pretty much every other suggestion I made takes considerably more effort - what's so hard at disabling a few jobs? Maybe you're thinking it takes a lot more clicking and hand holding than it really does: Just go to the population tab, expand the specialist jobs section, scroll down to the roboticists, and click the [-] botton until all the roboticists are gone. You will never have to go back to that planet again and do anything else. No renewal required.

There are hundreds of things in the game that require more micromanaging than this. And the only help is the defective sector and planet automation AI. Yes they are defective, and that is a problem and it needs to be dealt with.

tl.dr: The overpopulation is only a symptom of the high micromanagement level and bad AI support. Asking for a fix to pop growth doesn't help - there are plenty of mechanisms for that in game already. What you need to do is ask for a fix to micromanagement hell!

 

[andriy.gerasika]

Every planet is ending up with a huge housing and unemployment issue.

Fix every planet to build only "servitude" robots by default and give them "servitor" trait -- when there will be no jobs, robots will become servitors, increasing amenities --> no unemployment forever.

Once you build ringworld for example, mass-resettle servitors from like everywhere and apply necessary template...

 

[Calvax]

1. The OP was asking for something akin to a decision. Disabling roboticist jobs doesn't take that much more time. It is exactly what the OP was asking for, and it does't even cost influence.

What I was asking for is an empire wide policy that prevents overpopulation with organics and synthetics, not a per planet fix which we already have but is tedious. Simply having a planet decision that affected both at once rather than needing a decision and job management would also be an improvement.

Also I don't think this issue requires quite as much anger as you're putting into your posts mate.

2. So far I've never seen anyone mention empires with more than 100 colonies. Me, I'd say I'm going extremely wide as far as I'm concerned, and in my last game I hit the tech cost overflow bug at 93 colonies with ~10K pops.

If you don't mind going through all of them constantly to check overpopulation and manually swap around jobs then that's fine for you. An empire-wide policy or a planet decision that prevented all forms of pop growth/assembly wouldn't prevent you from enjoying that.

3. It's not llike you would be disabling jobs all at once, nor would you be able to if using a decision: at 25 influence per planet you'd be restricted to at most 40 planets, and then wait for a very long time for the next batch.

And if the discourage growth option did both then there would be less clicking to prevent both kinds of growth. Or a policy that means a player doesn't need to pay close attention to whether or not there is about to be too many bots on one world.

4. Pretty much every other suggestion I made takes considerably more effort - what's so hard at disabling a few jobs? Maybe you're thinking it takes a lot more clicking and hand holding than it really does: Just go to the population tab, expand the specialist jobs section, scroll down to the roboticists, and click the [-] botton until all the roboticists are gone. You will never have to go back to that planet again and do anything else. No renewal required.

No one is saying it's difficult, it's not difficult, it's just tedious and unnecessary. In an empire management game preventing overpopulation, particularly due to manufactured robots, shouldn't require going into every individual planet and disabling certain jobs.

There are hundreds of things in the game that require more micromanaging than this. And the only help is the defective sector and planet automation AI. Yes they are defective, and that is a problem and it needs to be dealt with.

Yes there is a lot of micromanagement elsewhere that could be fixed. That doesn't really invalidate the fact that this is also a case of micromanagement. Otherwise agreed that automation needs to be improved.

tl.dr: The overpopulation is only a symptom of the high micromanagement level and bad AI support. Asking for a fix to pop growth doesn't help - there are plenty of mechanisms for that in game already. What you need to do is ask for a fix to micromanagement hell!

I'm not sure what you think is being asked for, because it is a fix to one aspect of micromanagement.

 

[Ronberg]

or with a button next to manual resettle to automate the resettlement to planets with free jobs

 

[RoverStorm]

Honestly a button on the species screen that says "resettle all pops of this species (or JUST this one subspecies, or ALL pops) from planets where they are unemployed to planets with jobs they can work" would be kinda nice.

I would ALSO like to be able to set "limits" to how many of each species I want on a planet if I have pop controls enabled. If I have 20 miner jobs on a planet, I want exactly 20 of my miner subspecies and NO MORE! And then I could also set limits to each of the other others as well. And if every job has a pop, then push all growth to another planet!

And on top of this being able to gene-mod by job would be nice as well. Miners get the miner trait, researchers the intelligent trait, etc. Some have said this is deliberately min-maxing, and yes it is. You can also already do it with a LOT of micro, and cutting out micro is a normally very good thing.

Finally, and this is something I've said for a while, with the right policy enabled I want to be able to manually select which pops can work which jobs, possibly from the species rights screen. No more worrying that the idiot system puts the indentured slaves to work in the Precinct instead of the Alloy Factory.

 

[Franton]

What I was asking for is an empire wide policy

Sorry, the screenshots you posted looked so wrong, I didn't pay enough attention to the text.

Also I don't think this issue requires quite as much anger as you're putting into your posts mate.

Sorry if I came across angry - I assure you I am not. I can be *insistent* at times though - sorry if that felt aggressive to you, that was not my intent.

If you don't mind going through all of them constantly to check overpopulation and manually swap around jobs then that's fine for you. An empire-wide policy or a planet decision that prevented all forms of pop growth/assembly wouldn't prevent you from enjoying that.

It's not so much that I *enjoy* holding hands with each planet, but that each planet matures at a different time: I *want* population to grow as fast as possible at least up to 80 pops, at which point I build the System Capital Complex, and then I add whatever remains to be added or upgraded. Only then does it make sense to shut down growth by whatever means is most appropriate.

I'm not even sure the AI automation does upgrade all the buildings, but your first screenshot seems to indicate that it does not. Anyway, the little I've learned about the Ai is that I won't let it touch my planets, even if it means I need to manage them all by myself.

So you could say, I do not enjoy the micormanagement involved, but I like even less what the AI does. So I'm running with the lesser evil.

And if the discourage growth option did both then there would be less clicking to prevent both kinds of growth.

True. But that kind of change would make it impossible to *only* shut down organic growth. And that's a legitimate requirement for Synth and ME players!

In an empire management game preventing overpopulation, particularly due to manufactured robots, shouldn't require going into every individual planet and disabling certain jobs.

Should it not? As explained above, it makes sense not to treat all planets the same. The Ai automation is already bad as is. This request would make it abysmal.

The level of simpification you're asking for does clearly not match the level of complexity that Paradox Games expose. Any Paradox game. What you're asking for can certainly be done. And probably it isn't hard either. But it's like a Porsche driver asking to always drive in first gear because he doesn't want to be bothered with switching gears. I can totally understand if the engineers at Porsche ignore such requests.